Brexit. Lining up for a non-event.
The more hype for an event, the bigger the possibility of a deception. A non-event instead of an exciting trading day. The looming Brexit vote on June 23th is already the grandmother of all high volatility events. Bet this time it will be no different. The July options trade at a big premium.
Exchanges chiming in on Brexit
Another sign of Brexit craze are the exchanges. The Chicago Board of Trade introduced options in the US on the British FTSE index end of 2015. Great for folks who want to trade options in the US on the index in the UK, and pay with US Dollars.
The LSE themselves will join the party. Weekly options on the FTSE will kick off trading May 31th. Just in time. There’s one market maker committed in quoting the weekly’s. As usual, it’s SIG Susquehanna quoting options. Doesn’t matter if there’s volume or not, their systems quote everything (except for the real long tails, though). Source on the FTSE weekly options: Fow (paywall).
Euronext doesn’t dare to quote FTSE options. No license. To participate in the Brexit, weekly options on FTSE ETF’s will be launched. Nobody ever trades ETF options at Euronext. At least they give it a try. No need to repeat who’s the market maker providing liquidity here. Here’s the factsheet. The option code for the FTSE ETF will be ISF. The options will be traded in euro’s.
Tom Voute to retire, ATG for sale
Algorithmic Trading Group, ATG for friends, is for sale. The Hong Kong-Dutch automated stock trader trades on their five European exchange memberships and through three brokers. They use a C# platform.
Co-founder and majority owner Tom Voute (57) will be retiring in his Dutch castle. The IMC veteran will be spending more time with the family, his garden and his website.
ATG IS NOT VIRTU
ATG employs seven people and has been profitable from the start. Their algo trading is done from the Hong Kong and Leiden offices. There’s also a dormant office in the Americas, on bounty island Curacao. Net equity is a modest €2.5 million, so we’re not talking about Virtu-like valuations.
Jokes aside, this isn’t an advertorial about a guy seeking to cash out on his shares. Tom Voute (+) wants to sell a part of his shares so another trader can take over the helm. Better yet, bring a delta1 strategy which can trade over the ATG infrastructure.
http://algorithmictradinggroup.nl is also for sale. please contact mldz at geektrading for details
LOL. The above is true, but was not posted by me (mldz).
Is Tibra for sale yet?
By the way, it only concerns the domain name algorithmictradinggroup.nl
The sale of ATG is probably the last attempt to avoid a similar fate as Source Capital. A sad news, after all. Together with Source Capital (which went bust last year), ATG was the most successful IMC spin-off. A sign of how difficult the recent market conditions are for smaller trading firms which cannot split the expensive infrastructure costs across a large number of profitable and diversified strategies and do not have a large number of researchers which eventually come up with some new idea. The competitive environment is consolidating and there is no sign that this trend will revert in the future. Large companies such as IMC and Optiver are the winners. However, the golden age for traders is gone, we will not see such high bonuses like in the past anymore. Most of the professional traders earn already less than the average google & facebook employee.
Let’s wish a good retirement to the founder of ATG (who is probably younger than he thinks), he might have now even more time to focus on this internet site.
Since when did Source Capital AG go bust?
I recently spoke with Igor and he says they’re still firing on all cylinders and making a ton of money to boot.
Source did not go bust. I do believe they’ve thrown in the towel, stopped trading and are winding down their operations. Last year a bunch of Source entities all merged, as a precursor to an orderly liquidation. Recently they announced a capital reduction down to only CHF 100 thousand (not enough to do any serious trading, obviously). Most telling is that in December 2015 the goal of the company was changed from securities trading to “the development and sale of software programs”. These facts may be checked with the commercial registry.
http://www.moneyhouse.ch/en/u/pub/source_capital_ag_CH-170.3.027.113-3.htm
Whatever it is that Igor is making a ton of money with, it’s not securities trading.
figures Optiver, anyone?
Optiver APAC made a little over ~$480MM USD for the current reporting period 2015-2016.
Average bonus for rank-n-file is estimated at around ~$280K USD
Well obviously trading is not what it used to be, since rumours are IMC is going to shut down its Zug office …
what should they shut down if they are breaking even?
The problem of this office is that they run quite trivial strategies depending only on speed, these strategies have been cloned in the meantime and are successfully running in at least other 3 different companies with the same speed as IMC, ergo the cake is divided. According to economic theory, the break even (cost=revenues) is a reasonable long term equilibrium state. In fact, the return on capital should be slightly higher than the risk free return (i.e. 0 in our days) because of the arbitrage/riskless type of trades. The only risk is operational, which is completely under control.
Source Capital is winding down operations since years, how can that be such a long process?
@Igor from Source Capital AG: https://globenewswire.com/news-release/2016/01/14/801916/0/en/Termination-of-membership-at-Nasdaq-Stockholm-AB.html
They are clearly out from trading, strange that Igor still works there. The idea to sell their technology to other clients is ridiculous. No serious prop trading shop is going to buy this.
Hong Kong desks made more than the Korean Cash Cow Kospi
How much more did the HK desks make?
HAHAHAHAHAH
Tom Voute is only 45 . They are not profitable and are loosing money. The whole thing is falling down the drain…They even do not have a director in Curacao (check their website). Who do they want to fool? Idiots trying to buy some shit C# code? Who the fuck creates strategies with C# BTW , only fools that cannot program and can’t do it in C or at least C++
Spikes only spikes they do.
I’ve build software to analyze over a thousand symbols real-time with algo’s (swing trading logic on a “normal” i7 computer) in C#.
It’s doesn’t really matter in what language you program, its how you program.
And by the way:F# (part of .NET) is more and more used by big banks in the UK and CH.
Considering your undue responds, for at least the programming part, to the above, I guess you will most likely fire away with a lot of “well substantiated” (hahum…cough) reasons why C# is for losers…. but hey… in the end it’s the logic that really counts.
kind regards 😉
P.S. by the way. I have no clue whether or not they actually make money or not. And I frankly; I really don’t care.
P.S. I’ll skip further “c++ / C / Java / C# is better” discussions. For me the logic is more important than the size of someone dick.
OK use C# if you know what you are doing.
If ATG owner wants to be taken serious, he should publish some serious information.
Why one would buy the code?
Igor hasn’t been employed by Source Capital for about 3 years now.
As a matter of fact, they don’t have any developers anymore since they closed down their office in Zug.
that would be, use c# or java if you know you’re not competing in low latency, high frequency space, and, depending on the problem, you’re willing to throw (sometimes a lot of) hardware at it.
Otherwise, if you’re not earning your bread with c or c++, talking about how it compares to some of these garbage collection interpreted languages in the context of systems programming has only some vague entertaining value…
What language is HiQ programming their strategies in? I don’t want to use something else.
For the ultra low latency stuff and the majority of their trading infrastructure they use JavaScript/Node.js and for the more higher level research and time-series database (columnar storage) stuff they use Coffee script.
Furthermore most of the infrastructure was developed primarily by a couple of ex-WorldQuant recruits.
“Spikes only spikes they do”
can you please elaborate? What does this mean?
jeez, “ultra low latency” and “javaScript” in the same sentence. And it’s not even sarcasm…
The Sniper in Mahwah is tweeting (infering) that either Flow, Optivar, or IMC are buying McKay Brothers.
What is happening?
Optivar
Looks like the cat is out of the bag.
No it’s not Flow, IMC or “Optivar” – For the past several months. McKay Brothers have been in negotiations with Virtu. There are some details to finalize, specially considering the majority of the McKay Brothers’s clients are Virtu’s direct competitors and they all have multi-year service contracts that have liquidated damages clauses attached that need to somehow be unwound.
But yeah as Vinnie would say: “that’s the skinny of it”
.
Optivar, this spelling is cooler than the original!
Lots of rumors floating around about a firm, which is frequently mentioned on this website, suffering from big losses in soybean meal options, any estimates?
which firm?
the witch firm
Ahem.
You were saying?!
SOOOOOOLD!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Optivar having a billion dollar year again.
It was a real non event.
heard that Autumn Compass got wiped out by Brexit. they got on the wrong side of a trade to optiver
Autumn Compass is still building their systems. They are not plugged in yet.
Yeah, Optiver stopped the delivery truck bringing in some new mouse and keyboards
@11:32am I don’t think you know what you’re talking about. Autumn Compass is already actively trading as designated MMs on all the major exchanges in the US and APAC and will be going live in EMEA by the end of July.
The idea is to get up and running and replicate the Optiver strategies as quickly as is possible so that the profits from those strategies can bootstrap the R&D for their future highly profitable strategies.
I think they call this trickle down economics.
It’s not trickle down economics – it’s called going to a gun fight armed with a knife
@3:56am “I think they call this trickle down economics.”
lol.
it seems Autumn Compass have a HR department, judging by the rubbish about their great ability that gets posted on here